In The Five Faces of Dr Who (BBC 2) it was the inability to make a fire which kept the plot busy. The Tardis had come down in the Ice Age and unless the good doctor could find his matches the local Fire Maker would terminally upstage the time travellers. This was the very first yarn, from 1963. I found I remembered the establishing sequence almost shot for shot, with the Tardis's humble phone-box exterior gratifyingly revealing spacious quarters within. The shaggy Ice Age people, who, to be honest could be confused with Monty Python's comic cavemen, I'd quite forgotten, along with the prissy earthlings of William Russell and Jacqueline Hill. William Hartnell's Dr Who was trended to Carole Ann Ford. Since in his successive incarnations he has become younger and younger in years he now has a little companion instead. It must be odd for Verity Lambert, still in her young womanhood. to be reminded that she founded an institution.

The absolute forgettables in television are the situation comedies, or anyway the 95 per cent of them that fail to become unique and peculiar. If you analyse the run of the mill ones even perfunctorily, all they are doing is to dress up the commonplace in the pert exchanges that win a laugh from the studio audience. Flavour of the season is skin-bracer intermingled with pimple-remover as sagging middle-aged man co-habits with young girl. Trying to concoct a superior or more cerebral version must be like trying to write a sonata for the banjo. ... still they come.

TOMORROW

5.40 (BBC 2): Five Faces of Dr Who. This week doctor number two, played by Patrick Troughton, in an adventure from 1968 written by Robert Holmes.

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APA 6th ed.: (1981-11-08). It was the inability to make a fire which kept the plot busy. The Daily Telegraph p. 15.

MLA 7th ed.: "It was the inability to make a fire which kept the plot busy." The Daily Telegraph [add city] 1981-11-08, 15. Print.

Chicago 15th ed.: "It was the inability to make a fire which kept the plot busy." The Daily Telegraph, edition, sec., 1981-11-08

Turabian: "It was the inability to make a fire which kept the plot busy." The Daily Telegraph, 1981-11-08, section, 15 edition.